Very complex Pinot Noir Riserva with notes of hibiscus tea, cranberry, rosemary, cloves and dried strawberry

Kurtatsch Glen was named one of the ten best Pinot Noirs in Italy by the “Concorso Pinot Nero”, a competition celebrating the notoriously finicky varietal. It prefers cool air and doesn’t like blazing sun, so it’s a challenging grape for Italy. That’s why the Glen vineyard isn’t located in the village of Kurtatsch, which gets lots of sun in the morning and early afternoon, but on the eastern side of the Alto Adige valley instead. There, the grapes are sheltered from the burning summer sun until mid-afternoon. The vineyard is planted at an altitude stretching from 450 to 700 metres above sea level, where the cool Alpine nights help the Pinot Noir grapes to develop fresh and elegant flavours.

Winemaking: After pressing, the grape juice is cooled and left in contact with the skins for three days. This helps to extract more colour and flavour. After three days, the indigenous yeasts that live on the grape skins naturally kick-start the fermentation process. Then, the wine is fine-filtered and pumped partly into 225-litre French oak barriques (70%), and partly into large oak barrels (30%) to age for twelve months. This style of ageing in small barrels exposes a greater surface area of the wine to oak, imparting flavours of cloves and turning the colour from ruby to garnet. The wine is aged in a cellar built deep under the Alps, in a dolomite cave. This microclimate, which is rich in minerals, is truly unique to Kurtatsch.

Tasting notes: This wine has a medium garnet colour. On the nose, it offers pronounced aromas of hibiscus tea, cranberry, rosemary and cloves, followed by hints of leather, dried orange peel, dried strawberry and meaty notes. On the palate, this Pinot Noir wine is dry, with medium acidity. It has a high level of alcohol and a full body with visible tannins. It can be enjoyed now, but will further improve with ageing.

Wine Geek’s verdict: This wine has a lot of potential! It has enough vibrant cranberry juice flavours to keep it going in bottle for years, but there are already interesting things happening with its developed aromas (dried strawberry, dried orange peel, etc). The tannins are still quite grippy, which suggests there’ll be a lot of evolution in the future. The oak ageing style is quite firm; more in line with classic approaches rather than in the modern light-touch style where it’s almost undetectable.

Awards and ranking: James Suckling – 91 points (2017 vintage) | I Vini di Veronelli 2020 – 3 stars (2016 vintage)